The present invention relates to an automatic label winder and, more particularly, to an automatic label winder which is capable of automatically winding a label web upon a cassette. The cassette itself can be removably mounted in a label applicator so that the printed labels of the label web may be applied to various goods.
In the prior art, there is known a portable label applicator for printing labels, which are temporarily adhered in series to a web of backing paper, and for peeling the printed labels from the backing paper and then applying them to various articles. Such label applicators are called "hand labelers" and they are used widely in supermarkets and other similar establishments to mark goods. A hand labeler of this type is used for applying labels to the commodities mainly at sales counters where the commodities are stored. As a result of the widespread use of bar code labels in recent years, it has become necessary to generate labels which include bar codes. However, the bar codes cannot be printed by means of the simple printing head attached to the hand labeler of the prior art with the required precision which would allow the labels to be correctly read out by means of an optical reader.
The printing head for bar codes must necessarily be made larger than that used for ordinary letters because of the comparative sizes of bar codes and letters. Consequently, the hand labeler becomes very large and heavy if provision for printing bar codes is made in the hand labeler itself. This increases the difficulty of handling the hand labeler and results in operator fatigue. Moreover, the bar codes must include check digits and it is difficult to incorporate the additional function of automatically computing the check digits in the ordinarily small labelers of the prior art. Therefore, the check digits have to be separately computed and entered into the printing head so that the use of the hand labeler together with the bar codes having the check digits becomes inconvenient.
In view of this inconvenience, a system has been proposed in which first a label web is printed and then the label web is wound upon a cassette. The cassette with its preprinted labels is then loaded into a label applicator. With this system, label printing and application can be carried out precisely and efficiently. However in the prior art the operation of winding the label web upon the cassette is a troublesome manual operation.